


faster than a bullet coming out of that gun

by twistedingenue



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, bamf!darcy, look let's just blame meri and get it over with, winter soldier - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 07:40:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1143320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedingenue/pseuds/twistedingenue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy wakes up with the absolute knowledge that today is the day she is going to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	faster than a bullet coming out of that gun

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt from Meri: Steve/Darcy: a verse where Darcy has been trained by the Winter Soldier. Along the lines of Leon/the Professional when she was a child. A secret she has kept until she ends up in a situation that call for those skills to be put to the test.
> 
> I've never seen The Professional, but hey, I took this prompt and RAN with it. I haven't written an entire story in a day in a long time.
> 
> A thank you to theladyscribe, who beta'd for me. You are wonderful and lovely. All remaining mistakes are my own.

Darcy wakes up with the absolute knowledge that today is the day she is going to die. The sun is shining through her open window and after her eyes adjust to the brightness, she sighs once, just once, and gets up to take a shower. It's not good for her skin, but she turns the water up as hot as she can stand it, lets the pressure and heat relax her sleep-heavy muscles. She washes her face, moisturizes and fills in her brows.

She straps her favorite knife underneath her jeans, and Darcy goes to work.

What else is there to do?

* * *

Usually, there's a taboo against going to grad school in the same place as your undergrad, but Darcy couldn't just leave Jane. Jane is so small, so stubborn, and so many miles ahead of anyone else that she just seems like a space cadet. And Thor might be back, but he can't spend all of his time with them. Darcy found her a second assistant to help with the actual science, and Darcy? Darcy takes care of Jane. So she stays at Culver and tells herself she'll go somewhere else for the doctorate. It's not ideal, but it's common enough, and Culver's program is really good.

The assistantship pays her way and Jane pays for groceries, and occasionally Thor's friends come with him to visit. She meets Steve and likes him even before she puts two and two together to get Captain America. Which admittedly takes about thirty seconds, but Steve seems the sort that you have a strong opinion towards instantly. Darcy's opinion had been head over heels, and she spends the rare time that Steve visits trying to be subtle about it.

She's not subtle about it at all, but somehow Steve still doesn't notice.

Darcy wishes she could have kissed him once before she died.

* * *

"Darcy," Jane puts a stack of papers down next to Darcy's laptop. Darcy’s trying to finish a paper and send it off before the end of the day, but every word seems so distant and wrong, like they aren't actually words. Just collections of letters and electrons on the screen. They don’t mean anything, and they haven’t meant anything all day.  Jane snaps, bringing Darcy back to attention, "Darcy. Sorry, I need to get these grades in and I finally got lab time. Can you enter them for me?"

Darcy smiles brightly, "Sure thing boss." She thinks for a second about all the possibilities today holds, "Are you in that tiny lab again or one of the bigger ones?"

"They have names, Darcy. You should be aware of them. "

Darcy pulls a face, rolling her eyes and exaggerating her features.

"It's the big one," Jane condescends.

"Cool, I'm coming with. I can work from there." Darcy closes her laptop, and stuffs it, the papers, and half the contents of the table into her bag. Her hand touches her taser, and she wonders if it will be enough for whatever comes her way today.

"You don't need to do that, I know you have your own work to do. I can bring Ian, it'll be okay." Jane says her eyebrows knitting together.

"Jane, for you, I've got all the time in the world."   It just so happens that Darcy's world isn't going to last very much longer. But she can't protect Jane if she's not with her.

* * *

Darcy was a free-range kid during the summers. Her parents worked all the time, so they packed her up with uneasy smiles and tears and sent her to live with her Uncle Anton. He was old and he he doted on her. He told stories of working in a school back in Russia for lost little girls, and he was always a little sad about them.  Uncle Anton's house backed up into the woods and she spent hours and days where she sometimes couldn't see the sky for the trees. She’d come back at the end of the day scratched up and smiling, but she always found her way back to the house.

She was ten when Yasha came. Uncle Anton slammed the door in his face the first night, and when Darcy opened it the next morning, he was still there, slumped against the side of the house. His eyes were confused, his hair stuck up on its ends, and he wore a heavy jacket and gloves even though it was already warm.

"Please, please tell your uncle to help me. Please?" he says, starting to reach out and then recoiling when he was just about to touch her.

Uncle Anton came outside, bent over the man and sighed at him, in the same sad way he talked about the schoolgirls, "Got away again, Yasha, have you?"

"I don't want to go back." Yasha says, his voice shaking, "I don't want to go to the cold again."

"They'll find you,"  her uncle chided, his voice thicker and more accented than normal. "Do not cause any pain to my niece, and you will leave when I tell you to go. Summer doesn’t last forever, Winter Soldier."

Yasha was handsome, and a man unlike any that Darcy had ever seen before. He spoke to her kindly, like he was used to little girls looking up to him with awe and shyness, and within a week she walked in from the forest and saw him in the heat of the sun, without the jacket and the gloves and sees the glimmer of metal down his arm.

"I lost it," he laughs when she asks about it.

"How do you lose an arm?" Darcy demands, not understanding. You don’t just lose an arm, something has to happen to it.

Yasha shrugs and points to the forest, "Are you safe out there?"

It's Darcy's turn to shrug, "I ran into the Ericksons last week and got into a fight when they were tearing the bark off of the trees. That can kill them if you do it too much, and the boys shouldn't be doing it."

"You fight often?" Yasha does kneel down and lets her touch his arm. The metal is hot from the midday sun, but it's fascinating.

"Sometimes," she admits, because it's a secret, the fights she gets into. "I don't like that people are cruel. My parents think I'm clumsy.” She steels her jaw, waiting for the reproach, that girls shouldn’t fight. “I got to do something, right?”

Yasha narrows his eyes at her, and tells her that she should learn how to fall first.  It’s the first lesson she learns from him. Yasha goes out into the woods with her and he teaches her to fight and to pay attention, to notice patterns and to never get up.  He never tells her to back down because she’s a girl. Yasha argues a lot with Uncle Anton, and he looks scared sometimes, like there’s a delicate card house about to fall.

She's a natural, apparently, and he gives her one of his own knives on the day she breaks through his defense and stops just short of his skin. He jumps back in terror, real and unrefined, that Darcy doesn’t understand. She’d never be able to hurt him for real. He grabs her by the shoulders, "You don't do this to anyone unless they are trying to kill you Darcy. Never." He runs his good hand through his hair, and sinks back to his heels, “I’m doing it again.”  

Yasha is gone the next day.

Uncle Anton dies a few years later, a sudden and swift illness.There’s no dark haired Yasha at his funeral, and none of the women he’s taught, just a long line of large Russian men at the back.

Her parents whisper at the funeral that his body was so mangled that they couldn't open the casket. What sort of illness does that?

* * *

Darcy connects Yasha with the Winter Soldier as an adult, the day that Thor, Steve, and Natasha visit to brief Jane’s team on some intel that suggests there’s an unsavory sort of interest in Jane’s research. When Natasha says the words “Winter Soldier” in a frank and flat voice, Darcy is ten again, and Uncle Anton is looking down at a man and telling him that summer ends.

She should have told someone that she knows this man, but she can’t explain why sweet Uncle Anton would have even known him. She doesn’t want to explain that she still knows everything Yasha taught her, long after she learned to use her words rather than her fists.

Darcy is certain that Natasha knows. They have the same measure and beat of Yasha in them. Natasha wears it like a badge of honor, Darcy hides it down in sorrow for her Uncle. Darcy's sure Natasha knows in one glance, but also gets in return a respect for her secrets.

Because if you know where to look, you can see the shape of him in their footsteps.

* * *

 Jane keeps the lab cold, but rubbing her hands together helps distract the unease in Darcy’s gut. She's finishing putting in half a semester's worth of grades into the computer when she hears them, she hears helicopters, and she clicks save three times just to make sure it goes through. She doesn't want Jane to have to re-do the work.

It's strange, she thinks, as she pushes Jane into a closet with a cell phone when she hears the door to the lab being kicked open, that she has no idea what is going on. She doesn't know how she knew this was going to happen. It is though, and it all happens in a disconnected slow motion. She pulls out her knife, that knife that Yasha gave her so many years ago, before the men get near her.

It doesn't take much to kill with a knife. She counts five men, none of them are familiar to her, and two are down on the ground, dying slowly and unarmed by the time they know she's there. Jane is screaming. Darcy is breathing.

Fighters slash, but killers stab, and Darcy's finding she's a killer now. There's another noise, another helicopter, and she's already drowning, she won't be able to take more people coming after Jane. But she's got to try, has to protect Jane. She hopes Thor will say nice things about her at her funeral in that big booming voice, that he'll tell her parents he's proud. Knowing Thor has always wanted to make her better.

She feels the blood on her face, on her hands and arms before she's finally overwhelmed, and the shot is to her gut, and she's on the ground, but she stumbles enough to take the last man down with her. So this is how it goes, how it happens. It's the worst day to be right.

Darcy's vaguely aware when the door is stormed again, Jane's cries filling the air. These three stop at the scene, at Darcy slumped against a lab table, holding her stomach, and feeling the blood pulse. They suddenly come into focus, and she connects Captain America to Steve again.

"Did you?" he says, as a woman and another man go to the closet,  and looks over the dead invaders on the floor. "Did you do this, Darcy?"

"Knew it was going to be a bad day," Everything's starting to go slow, but Steve sits beside her, takes her hand. "But I did it, I did it right. I just wish…" She know her voice is wavering and too quiet, and the blood on the ground is her, "I wish…."

"What do you wish Darcy?" Steve sounds about a mile away, and Jane's out of the closet now, still yelling, yelling her name over and over, but Steve has his hands around her now.

"Can I…" she can't even say all the words, "kiss?"

It's enough to bring her gloriously, brilliantly into focus for a moment, Steve's lips on hers, and it's nothing piteous. There's fingers going through her hair and this is a wonderful way to die. She saved Jane and she got her kiss, and the world goes black.

* * *

Yasha taught her never to stop in the face of overwhelming odds.

* * *

She wakes up again. That's unexpected. Thor hanging out at her bedside when she wakes up is even more unexpected.

When her eyes focus, blink a few times, and her throat is dry as fuck, she looks at Thor and croaks out, barely  more than a gargle of sound, "But I was supposed to die."

"You did." Thor says, unaffected by her sudden arrival into the world of consciousness, like he knew it would happen at that time and not a moment before. "Twice during surgery, I am told, brave sister."

Well, that makes sense. Darcy closes her eyes and is back asleep before anyone else can arrive.

* * *

The next time it's Jane who wakes her up with words and words and more of them. And she can't make sense of them through the tears and the nurse who comes in and fiddles with something on her side. She hurts so much, like her belly is on fire and will explode at any unreasonable moment.

But she died and now she's alive.

* * *

The next time she wakes up, it's only for a few minutes. But she's aware when Natasha says from the doorway, "You were sloppy but he would be proud."

Finally, frustratingly awake, she sees Steve and she slams into the world. He touches her face and smiles at her and says like it's both a prayer and a miracle, "You made it." As if she's the first person to ever come back from the dead.

"I did," she says and his hand tightens around hers.


End file.
